How do you promote your product without sounding too salesy?
I've always struggled with promoting my own work. 😓 It always felt a little awkward because I grew up in an environment where drawing attention to yourself wasn't really encouraged.
That's not exactly ideal when you're trying to build a business, and even less so when marketing is literally how you make a living. :D
I never had a problem promoting other people's products. Just my own.
Now I'm in the same situation again.
I'm building a LinkedIn plugin, and one of the main ways to get it in front of people is by talking about it on LinkedIn.
The problem is, I don't want people to see me as someone who's constantly selling.
What would you recommend doing to promote a product without coming across as too pushy or too salesy?
Here's what I've tried so far:
On X, I'm taking a build-in-public approach and sharing my coding journey and I leave the link in the comments.
I've added the waitlist link to my social media profiles.
When one of my LinkedIn posts performs well, I edit it afterwards and add a short call to action at the end, inviting people to join the waitlist.
If a LinkedIn post isn't related to the tool, I'll sometimes leave a funny comment underneath it and add a P.S. mentioning my tool.
I want to dedicate at least one LinkedIn post per week specifically to the product I'm building.
I'd love to hear what has worked for you.
Replies
Building geniuine connections before you have a product. It a relationship game, dont just nurture your relationships when you have smth to sell. Play the long game
Hi! I'm a developer doing marketing for the first time, so this question is basically my daily life. What worked for me: I stopped promoting the product and started documenting the process of building it, failures included. My most-read post is about the day my own AI invented fake client metrics in a draft. Nobody reads "check out my tool" but people read "here's how I screwed up." The product mention rides along for free.
I focus on sharing what I'm learning instead of constantly pitching the product. When people find your insights useful, they're naturally curious about what you're building....
Still figuring this out myself. My approach so far: only post when there's something real happening — a bug I fixed, a decision I'm wrestling with, a milestone (even a boring one like "waiting on a payment processor's manual review"). If I wouldn't say it to a friend over coffee, I don't post it. Feels less salesy than "check out my product" posts, and honestly more fun to write.
I’ve struggled with this too, and what helped me was separating “promoting” from “asking people to buy.” I try to talk about the problem I’m solving, what I’m learning, mistakes I’ve made, and small wins from building the product, then mention the tool only when it genuinely fits the conversation. I’ve found that people usually don’t mind hearing about a product if I’m giving them something useful first. At IMP Marketing, I think about content through a performance-based and revenue-share mindset, so I ask myself whether the post builds trust or helps someone make a better decision, rather than whether it pushes the product hard enough. I’d keep the weekly product post, but make most of those posts about real use cases, user pain points, or bts decisions, with a simple CTA at the end. That feels much more natural than adding the tool to every unrelated post.
The trick that got me past the same block: stop being the one making the claim. When I say my product saves hours, that's promotion, everyone's guard goes up. When a user says 'this used to take me all evening and now it's twenty minutes', that's just information. Same claim, different mouth, completely different feeling.
So I collect user sentences relentlessly. A good line in a DM, a support reply, a call, ask 'mind if I share that?' and post it with a little context. You're never talking about yourself, you're quoting someone.
And it fits your upbringing point neatly. You were taught not to draw attention to yourself, so don't. Give the spotlight to the person who got the result.
Suzy's "promote the problem, not the product" is exactly what shifted things for me too. Every time I tried to talk about FounderFlow's features (confidence grading, cross-business monitoring, etc.) it fell flat. The posts that actually got replies were the ones where I just admitted the real problem, running a software company, a care home, and a cafe at once means I miss things, and once a slow Monday at the cafe turned into a real cash-flow scare I didn't catch in time. People relate to the specific bad moment, not the roadmap. The product only comes up now when someone asks "so what did you do about it," which feels a lot less like selling and a lot more like just answering a question honestly.
Most answers here are a version of promote the problem not the product, which is right but by now it is the default advice, so let me add the two things that actually shifted it for me.
First, salesy is a frequency and reciprocity problem, not a wording problem. The exact same CTA reads as pushy from someone who only ever posts about their own tool, and reads as fine from someone who has spent weeks answering other people's questions with nothing to sell. People keep a rough ledger. Bank specific help first and the ask stops feeling like an ask, because you have earned the right to make it.
Second, and this is specific to a LinkedIn plugin: the least salesy promotion is the promotion you never have to do. Your tool produces an artifact, a better post, a cleaner comment, whatever it improves. Make that output the marketing. If the plugin visibly makes someone's post better and they share it, their post is the advert and you sold nothing. A tool whose output is public already has a distribution channel most products would kill for. Put your energy into making the output worth sharing, not into your own posting cadence.
Honestly the thing that's worked for me is just saying plainly that I'm the founder whenever FounderFlow comes up, like I'm doing right now, instead of dancing around it. People can tell when you're hiding the ball. The salesy feeling usually comes from trying to make every comment do double duty as a pitch. I only bring mine up when it's actually the answer to the question, otherwise I just answer the question.
I focus on sharing real problems our product solves instead of pitching features. Helpful content, customer stories, and genuine conversations usually build more trust than a direct sales pitch.